Chapter 23 Wells
WELLS
Only one week left in January, and still, an entire season’s worth of winter hangs heavily over this quiet stretch of Connecticut. The storm’s long gone, but it left everything waterlogged and wind strewn.
We won’t see green again for months. We won’t feel thaw for longer.
Though today, at least, the sun seems to be making amends for the weekend’s tantrum. It’s pale but persistent. And I’m working in it, stacking what’s left of the woodpile, releveling the step that finally gave out, hammering in the damn nail that’s been catching on people’s shoes for weeks.
It’s the kind of work that doesn’t require thinking, which is exactly why I’m doing it.
If I don’t keep my hands moving, my thoughts go to places I can’t control.
Places like the shape of Elsie’s breath in the dark.
The sound of her voice when she whispered my name.
The way she looked at me like she’d never wanted anything more.
I know that feeling well.
The house is steadier with the sun out, but every so often, the eaves groan like they’re remembering the storm. I press harder into the hammer each time, as if noise and effort might quiet the memory of what I let myself have for a single night.
And Elsie—she’s not ignoring me this time, not exactly.
She’s pretending to be busy. Holing herself up in the house, scribbling notes like she’s preparing for a cross-examination instead of a committee meeting.
Pages and pages of dates, names, lineage, everything but the one conversation we both know we still owe each other.
And hell, I’ll take this version—writing at the table, chewing her pen, muttering at the margins—over the version who hid a letter and flinched every time I walked into a room.
But if she’s going to keep her distance, I wish she’d at least do it at Mirabelle, or Fowler’s, or anywhere that isn’t five feet behind me through a wall.
It’s dangerous, both of us cooped up like this.
Too easy to start wanting softness where there shouldn’t be any.
And God, I do want it—still. Still enough to hope she might turn toward me again.
But if she’s made up her mind, if she really means to leave, I won’t be the one to press a hand to the door she’s already closing.
I suggested she take a walk to the orchard. Or browse Mrs. Fowler’s bookshelves. Clear her head. She gave me that flat, unimpressed look. I think she’d rather wrestle legal documents than risk talking to me again.
So, I let her be. And I work.
I’m halfway through tightening the hinge on the screen door when Jack’s truck crunches up the drive. He parks half-crooked like always, door screaming in protest as he shoves it closed. Then he hops out with a six-pack dangling from one hand.
“Brought you a peace offering,” he says with a grin that means trouble.
I squint at him. “Peace for what, exactly?”
He shrugs. “Your sins. Your fuckups. Your general disposition. Dealer’s choice. Just figured you’d need something cold after all this grief you’re giving your porch.”
I wipe my hands on my jeans. Jack hands me a bottle and cracks one open for himself, leaning against the post. He’s clocked in for the day.
“Did the storm hit you bad?” I ask.
“Not really,” he says. “But Isla’s place got knocked around. I’ve been up there the last few days. Helping her clean up.”
I raise an eyebrow. “That right?”
“Yeah. Lot of branches down. Lots of, uh, debris to sort through.”
I snort. “If by debris, you mean unresolved tension and years of—”
“Watch it,” he warns.
I hold up a hand. “Just saying. You two should either get married or finally fuck and get it over with.”
Jack takes a long drink, unbothered. “Talk to me in a few months.”
That stops me. “That supposed to mean something?”
He doesn’t answer, which is answer enough.
He looks off toward the ridge, and for a breath, there’s nothing cocky about him at all. This is my best friend, but he won’t let me in. Normally, I’d needle him ’til he cracked. Today, I let him keep it.
Silence settles. The woods creak back to life. My hammer finds a rhythm as I finish resetting the riser. When I finally speak again, I keep my eyes on the step.
“Elsie and I’ve been going through the trust,” I say. “I’ve been pulling everything I can find on how it could work. For her. On her terms.”
Jack whistles low. “She agreed to it?”
“Not fully. Not yet. She wants to understand it first. That’s something.”
“That’s more than something. That’s damn near miraculous.”
I nod once. Then, quieter: “We also slept together.”
He chokes on his beer. Coughs, swears. “You what?”
“Jack—”
“Fucking hell, man. You dickmatized her into agreeing to the trust, didn’t you?”
I scowl. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Mmhmm,” Jack says, unconvinced. “Doesn’t take much to resurface a track record like yours.” He squints at me. “I still remember the fire department raffle incident. Two sisters, one bottle of tequila—”
I smack him upside the head to shut him up. It works.
He may be right about my past, but that doesn’t mean I like to relive it.
When I first moved to Blue Willow, I was a walking wound with something to prove, doing anything I could to feel better—or feel wanted. And when that stopped working, I chased the opposite. Wanted to feel nothing at all. Numb was safer than lonely.
But the longer I stayed, the less it felt like I had something to outrun. The town got quieter. So did I. I stopped treating my own body like a distraction. Stopped chasing the kind of company that came without conversation.
I sigh through my teeth. “That was five years ago, dipshit.”
“Okay, so it wasn’t like that.” He tilts his head. “Then what was it like?”
I glance back at the woodpile, the half-fixed railing, the whole damn house listening in. “It was . . . something else. She’s . . . I don’t know. Fuck, she’s not like anyone I’ve ever met. Half the time, I want to throttle her, and the other half, I—”
“Want to fuck her?”
“Want to understand her,” I say. “Want to fight with her. Want to figure out why she makes everything feel different. I like her, Jack. I like her when she’s mad.
I like her when she’s guarded. And yeah, I’d like to take her to my bed again.
But more than that . . . I think I’d like the chance to love her, too. ”
Jack looks at me for real then. No smirk or swagger from a man who’s known me long enough to recognize when I’m past posturing.
“She got under your skin,” he says quietly.
“She lives there now.”
He nods, slow. “That hit you like a bolt of lightning?”
“No,” I say. “It hit me outside Haven & Hearth. When I made her cry. I wanted to pull her in, apologize without condition, promise I’d never do it again. I haven’t stopped wanting that since. Now that we’ve slept together, it’s gonna be hard as hell to pretend it didn’t mean something to me.”
The admission rubs me raw. Jack waits, knowing I haven’t finished, but I keep the rest to myself. There aren’t many things I get to claim as mine alone.
I pull out my wallet and thumb through a stack of faded receipts until I find it—Elspeth’s letter, folded small and worn soft at the edges.
“Her grandmother wrote this for me,” I say. “Weeks before she died. Elsie found it in the attic.”
Jack reads it without a word, then folds it back, careful as a prayer, and hands it over.
“So, you want to be with her now because Elspeth told you to?”
I stare at him. “Were you listening to me at all?”
“I was.” He shrugs. “I’m wondering what part of this is about the house, about Elspeth, about grief, and what part’s actually about you.”
“It’s about her.” I pace, jaw tight. “She makes this place feel alive again. She sees every crack and still thinks she’s the broken one.
She makes me want to be the kind of man who deserves her trust. I want her to choose what she can live with.
But I want her to know she doesn’t have to do it alone. ”
Jack watches me for a beat, arms folded. “Then you better make damn sure she knows that, too. Because if you’re standing here saying you like her, that you want her to choose what’s best for her—then that has to mean giving her room to make the wrong choice. To walk away.”
“I’m not going to force her to stay.”
“No,” Jack says. “But you’ve got a habit of trying to control the fallout. Of telling yourself you’re doing the right thing when really, you’re just afraid of what happens if you stop managing everyone else’s damage.”
He pushes off the post and claps a hand on my shoulder. “I’m not saying don’t fight for this if it’s what you truly want.”
I squint at him. “The way you fight for Isla?”
His jaw ticks. “Isla’s not mine to fight for.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“Maybe.”
“If you keep pretending you don’t notice her,” I say, “you’re going to beat Reid out for the most emotionally constipated man in Blue Willow.”
Jack isn’t the only fool fighting his own heart. Reid’s been carrying a torch for Winnie since they were kids—quiet, stubborn love that’s lodged itself so deep it probably burns when he breathes.
Honeywild’s in his blood, and so is she. Everyone knows it.
But she’s got a daughter with someone else, and Reid . . . he’s the kind of man who’d rather break his own heart than make hers heavier. He’s always been more willing to hurt quietly than risk losing the family he chose for himself.
Which is why I’m worried Jack’s going to let the same thing happen.
That he’ll drag his feet long enough for Isla to get tired of waiting, pack up her sharp tongue and soft heart, and let herself get swept off her feet by some out-of-towner with a boat and a trust fund.
Someone who sees her for what she is and doesn’t need a decade of bickering to figure it out.
Jack and I finish our beers on the porch steps, side by side. He doesn’t say anything else about Isla, and I don’t press. But I see the way his thumb taps against the bottle—restless. Thinking of her and all the words he still hasn’t said.
Eventually, he stands, tosses both empties into the bed of the truck.
“You know where to find me,” he says. “If you need somebody to tell you you’re being a jackass.”
“Don’t worry,” I mutter. “You’re always first on the list.”
He barks a laugh. Then he climbs in, starts the engine, and lets the gravel swallow him whole. When he’s gone, the porch goes still. I stay there a while, rubbing my thumb along the grain of the railing, thinking about everything I shouldn’t be thinking about.
How deep I already am. How deep I’d go, if she’d only ask.
By the time I start packing up the tools, I’ve almost convinced myself to head in and keep my head down. Then the screen door bangs open.
Elsie wanders out. She’s wrapped in one of Elspeth’s old coats, curls pinned up with a pen stuck crooked through them, clipboard clamped under one arm. It’s almost funny how serious she looks. Almost.
She stops at the top of the steps, flips to a fresh page. “I had another question about the trust, if you’ve got a minute.”
“Go for it.”
“If it’s set up as irrevocable, does that mean—”
I lose the thread. Not because she stops talking but because I stop listening. Her breath ghosts in the cold. Her brow creases when she concentrates. Her mittened fingers tighten on the clipboard.
She has no idea how much of a wreck she makes me. Beautiful. Contrary. Breakable. A woman I can’t stop wanting, even when she’s bristling at me.
“Wells?”
I blink. “Sorry—what?”
She huffs, impatient. “I said, in the event of dissolution, does it freeze the assets, or does it only restrict liquidation?”
“Depends how it’s written,” I answer slowly. “But most times, yeah. It freezes.”
She nods, writes something down, lips set tight. All I can think about is the morning after the storm—the way I wanted to gather her in, press my mouth to her shoulder, ask her if she could just stay here, stay mine.
How instead, I walked her into town like nothing happened. Acted as if my whole world hadn’t shifted. Let her keep the silence between us, as if holding it might somehow keep her close.
Maybe that’s what this is now. Me waiting and letting her pretend. Letting her decide if I’m something she wants or something else she needs to make herself forget.